1. Field of the Invention
Apparatuses and methods consistent with the present invention relate to data input/output control in an input/output subsystem, and more particularly, to analyzing a load feature of an input/output command of an application, determining whether the load of the input/output command corresponds to a multimedia application, and controlling the data input/output command delivered to a disk to correspond to the multimedia application according to the determination result.
2. Description of the Related Art
Disks have performed the important function of storing data in everything from mainframes to laptop computers for the past 30 years. In the past, the main concern about disks was their data storage capacity. However, since the data storage capacity of disks has been sufficiently increased in recent years, the intelligence of the disk has become a focus, to allow it to perform the role of the input/output subsystem.
FIG. 1 is a functional block diagram of a general input/output subsystem. The input/output subsystem includes an application layer 110, a file system layer 120, a disk driver layer 130 and a disk 140.
An operating system receives a file name input by a user from the application layer 110, which is an upper layer of the operating system, and retrieves the file name from a whole directory which is managed by itself. In the operating system, the input file is identified using file identification information called a file descriptor.
The storage space of the disk includes spatial components such as a track and a sector, and the file system layer 120 performs the role of organizing the spatial components into a linear array of logical blocks. In the general file system layer, each file is connected with a data structure, which is called an inode and has file related information such as the location, the last update time, and the access mode of the logical block in which the data is stored. The file system layer 120 retrieves the inode connected with the file which is a target of the input/output operation from the file descriptor which is received from the operating system, fetches the file related information from the inode, and performs the input/output operation.
The disk driver layer 130 connects the disk 140 to the operating system. The logical block number which is output as the result of the input/output operation is delivered to the disk driver layer 130. Since the disk 140 does not recognize the logical block number, the disk driver layer 130 converts the logical block number into physical spatial information such as a cylinder, a track and a sector, and delivers the physical spatial information to the disk 140. The disk 140 performs the input/output operation using the physical spatial information.
The general input/output subsystem inputs the data to and/or outputs the data from the disk 140 according to the input/output command received from the disk driver layer 120, whether the file which is the target of the input/output command is a text file or a multimedia file.
Information electronic devices having a computer function such as information processing, transmission and storage have a specialized load of the input/output command, such as recording or playback of multimedia data such as video files and music files, unlike a general-purpose computer.
Accordingly, a data input/output control method and apparatus in the input/output subsystem which determines whether the load of the input/output command corresponds to the multimedia application and controls the data input/output command delivered to the disk to correspond to an optimal mode of the multimedia application according to the determination result is required.